Mayo, CDS vendor join to provide medical guidance for lab tests

The Mayo Clinic and a clinical decision support vendor have joined forces in developing an online tool that offers real-time medical guidance to clinicians ordering laboratory tests.

National Decision Support Company’s CareSelect Lab is a tool that converts published guidelines on best-practice recommendations into actionable criteria that are delivered directly into the a hospital’s electronic health record workflow.

“CareSelect Lab is a natural extension of NDSC’s capabilities to deliver EHR-integrated guidelines and brings together the industry standard for EHR-delivered guidance with the more than 1,500 best-practice care models—authored, curated and maintained by Mayo Clinic,” says Michael Mardini, CEO of NDSC.

According to the vendor, CareSelect Lab is delivered via NDSC’s CareSelect Platform which it contends has been adopted by more than 250 health systems across the country. CareSelect Lab’s features include the ability to provide:

Clinical guidance on all laboratory, pathology and genetic testing that can be ordered (sourced from Mayo’s clinical library of evidence-based guidelines, and curated and delivered through NDSC’s CareSelect Platform).

Interaction directly with the test guidelines in a provider’s EHR workflow, with feedback as to the most appropriate test(s) to order

“It is commonly recognized that laboratory tests are frequently misordered, with a risk of profound negative impact on both care and cost,” adds William Morice II, MD, chair of Mayo Clinic’s Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology. “Healthcare providers around the world who rely on Mayo Clinic for testing need more than just access to our broad menu of tests. We must extend to them the same decision guidance that we avail to our own physicians and scientists—and we must do so in a way that integrates with their current workflows and systems.”

The announcement states that the Mayo Clinic has a financial interest in CareSelect Lab, but does not provide further details. However, it does disclose that Mayo will “use any revenue it receives to support its not-for-profit mission in patient care, education and research.”